How Mark Kosoglow Sells: A "Sales Nerd" on the Power of Digging for Gold

Mark Kosoglow‘s sales career started when he was 7 years old, selling his uncle’s toys for better ones. And it hasn’t stopped since.?

“I often tell people, I don’t have hobbies, I don’t go out with the guys; sales is my thing,” he said. “I consider myself a sales nerd and I’m proud of it.”

In his career, Kosoglow’s climbed from selling credit cards over the phone to curriculum to school districts to, currently, a sales execution platform to sales pros, in his role as the Vice President of Global Sales for?Outreach, which has been named one of?LinkedIn’s Top Startups?four years in a row.

So, what has Kosoglow learned in his lifetime dedicated to sales? Let’s dive in:

1. What do you love most about?selling??

I think selling combines a couple of really interesting things.

First off, I do like to help. Helping is understanding someone’s problem better, let’s throw out some solutions and pro-and-con them, and figure out what they like. I like that kind of solutioning and it satisfies my natural sense of curiosity. I really like that part of sales, which is helping.

The other part I really like is it’s a people sport. When I say something, how does it form in someone’s mind, and how do I frame it in such a way it keeps them open-minded, instead of them closing down? I think so much of human communication, unfortunately, closes people down, and I really enjoy the aspect of opening people up and caring more deeply about what they are doing.?

So, when you do that in combination with the helping, it’s fun to do.

2. What's your sales philosophy,?in 3 sentences or less?

Effort plus curiosity plus making connections means you are going to kick ass at sales.

Effort is, are you going to do the hard work. If it’s 5 p.m., and you need to make 100 phone calls, and you are at 92 —do you make the last eight, or do you go home? Great salespeople make the last eight calls.

Curiosity is two components, internal and external. Internal is why is my product the best, why do we sell it this way, why do I think that way? External curiosity is about the customer. What is their problem? Do they really understand their problem? Do they understand what I can do? You need to have both types of curiosity.

The last is making good connections. And that’s taking your internal curiosity, and the answers it develops, and the external curiosity and the things it shows you, and explicitly connecting for someone the value they get from putting both together.

If you are able to do those things, you are going to kick butt in sales.?

3. Is there anything that makes your sales process unique?

For me, what makes my process unique, is I let my personality and passion outweigh my professionalism.?

We have a really tight sales process at Outreach where we have steps and it’s well defined and you can run a deal through it. I’m not sure it’s that much different than anybody else’s.?

But I would hope where our team shines and where I’ve been successful in my career is, listen, you are going to love me or you are going to hate me, but you definitely aren’t going to be indifferent. If you don’t like me, you probably aren’t going to buy from me, and that’s okay.?

But I would rather sell to another human that I have another human relationship with, versus a business-to-business relationship with, just a professional relationship where I don’t really understand them or know what they care about.

I think that’s unique about what I do. I let my personality and passion outweigh my professionalism and that allows me to build strong relationships with people.?

4. What research do you do to prepare for a sales call??

The first thing I’ll do is I go to LinkedIn. I’ll get a sense of their writing style, if I go to their “About” section I can usually get something.

If it’s a public company, you can go listen to earnings calls, you can read 10-Ks as well. So, I’ll look at the publicly available information, and also do a social profile of the person and the company.

I usually go to their company LinkedIn Page too and look at the posts. A lot of people forget that there is a marketing department running the social strategy, and the social strategy is aligning to some business strategy. If you look and see the theme of the posts, you can sometimes deduce what the company is trying to do, which can point to a pain or challenge. And that can start a conversation.

5. What's your favorite discovery question??

I don’t have a favorite discovery question because I think having one actually makes you a bad discover-er. But I can tell you the analogy I use on why people get discovery wrong, and the four-step process I use to do it.?

So, this is how most people treat discovery. Imagine you are on a beautiful Hawaiian beach, you are walking with your partner, and you see a gold coin. Most people pick up that gold coin, get excited about it, and walk off.

But, what they should really do is grab a shovel and begin digging. Because there’s usually a chest full of gold under where there is a gold coin on the beach.?

Most sellers, what they do, is they say, “I found a gold coin. I found something I can sell to.” And they don’t dig a little bit deeper to find that treasure chest full of gold coins, which is where the deal is.

I have a four-step discovery process to do this.

Step one is called a visual context question. It is a question that puts people in a state of mind where they subconsciously access a goal of theirs.

An example of one I’d ask – You just got out of a meeting with your CEO. After it, the CEO grabs a marker, pops it open, and writes two things on the whiteboard, and breaks the marker when he puts the period at the end of the second one. What did he write on the board??

Then, you need to dig the pain hole. The reason you dig the pain hole is so you can do step three, which is to reach a diagnosis. A diagnosis is – “I think I hear what’s going on – this, this, and this. Do I have that right?”.?

The beauty of that is, if you get it right, they say that’s awesome, and then, give you more information. If you get it wrong, they correct you, and then they give you the right information.

And the fourth is a brief vision of the future and ask them what that would do for them. So that’s my four-step process for discovery.

If you search?#discodeepdive?on LinkedIn, you can get 20+ detailed posts on this topic.?

6. Is there any habit you have that you believe helps you?sell?better? Examples – meditation, exercise, waking up at a certain time?

I think the habit of asking questions.?

This is interesting. Go to a party and see how many conversations you can have where you only ask questions. And then, what you’ll notice when you’re doing that, is nobody will ask you a question back.

That’s a problem a lot of salespeople have. They don’t ask questions. So, I make that a habit.?

Also, take a deep breath and relax a little bit. A single conversation isn’t going to win or lose anything, unless you act like a complete idiot, which you’re not going to do. So just take a deep breath and have a conversation with somebody, versus a sales conversation.?

7. How?do you use LinkedIn when?selling?

Connections and research.?

Listen, it’s probably?had the greatest impact on B2B selling in I don’t know how long, the data and the information LinkedIn provides.

When I first started selling, I had to call the front desk, and ask who is this person? They may or may not tell me. Then I had to say, alright, how do I get in touch with them? And it would typically be sending them a letter to their physical address. Or I had to figure out their email address or call them and hope to get routed through the phone tree. And I’d have to build out all of the contacts in my territory, which by the time I did that half of them weren’t accurate anymore anyway.

It's just a very different selling environment to be able to go and look up basically anyone and see where they work, what they do, what their role is. And then have a means to which to connect with them.?

The other thing is I have probably a dozen people on my team now that are big content creators. Creating content on LinkedIn is a superpower. I have sales leaders ask me why so many my salespeople post so much on LinkedIn and I tell them, “Because it’s awesome. Because they get into deals, they get leads. It’s instant credibility.”

I think the biggest thing I do – and the biggest thing other people are hesitant to do – is regularly post. It pays off.

8.?What's the biggest lesson you've learned?in your sales career??

The biggest lesson I learned in my sales career is inner dialogue.

Humans digest data through their eyes and their ears mostly, especially in a sales situation.

Literally, light rays that hit your retina via and create an electric signal that your brain interprets. A sound wave is fluctuations in the air that your eardrum translates into electrical signals that hits your brain. That’s what we’re dealing with, ya’ll, electrical signals.?

And, unfortunately, your brain can’t process raw data like that. So, what it does is it creates a context to put that in.

The context is called an inner dialogue creates, and it creates an emotional response that’s in line with that context.?

So, the biggest thing I learned in sales is that if you can understand the inner dialogue of someone, you can ensure that they have an inner dialogue that’s consistent with the one you need them to have to understand what you are talking about.

To find out what someone’s inner dialogue is, ask a “how” or “what” question. Ask them, “How would you do X?” They’ll tell you their inner dialogue, and if it’s good, you keep going. If it’s misaligned, then I need to go back and correct it.?

My trump card in sales is understanding the inner dialogue. If you can understand the inner dialogue of someone, then you know where you stand, and if you have a possibility of selling to them.

9. What has been your biggest failure in sales and how did that experience transform you?

My first outside sales job, I got hired and I was selling to school districts. I got hired in March and I came in really hot, I was ready to go.

We had our sales kickoff that July and most reps, having sold all year, had maybe 40 or 50 contracts they’d signed over the school year. Well, I only worked since March, and I had sold 92 contracts.?

So, double what everyone else had done. And everyone thought I was lying, but I really had done that well.

But the problem was I didn’t really position it as a contract, more of a suggestion. So, when I got to the time where the contracts needed to be fulfilled, half of my deals went away. I went from this unbelievable thing to this tiny little producer.

That was probably the biggest mistake I ever made, which is,?I didn’t believe. I tried to soft-sell too much and I tried to have people like the idea, versus closing in on the commitment. I learned in the second year, close in on the commitment.?

It’s funny, in the years that persisted, people were a little nervous to sign with me. Because they knew, if they signed a contract with me, I was going to 100% hold them to it. And some people were hesitant to sign a contract.

But I really learned then, I’m giving you my time. I’m giving you my energy, my resources, my dedication, and hopefully the results you want. I’m going to give that to you.?

If you are going to ask that of me, you are going to honor the contract. That was my biggest early sales mistake and I think it still influences today. Even today I’m going to give – happy to do that, honored to do that. But I also need you to honor your part of the contract, too.

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